It used to be that
the only choices were milk, chocolate milk, and choking down that Swiss
steak, French fries, and Italian bread dry while hoping no one from the
European Union would taste any of it and start an international
incident.

It’s not easy eating a healthy lunch in school, especially if
you’re one of those kids who wants to know what it is you’re putting
in your mouth. While the easy solution would be to start a campaign
teaching children that gray stuff is a food group and they should be
eating at least four servings a day, it probably wouldn’t work. Kids
are smart. They know that food groups aren’t named after colors,
they’re named after planets, which is why they make sure to eat plenty
of Mars bars.

In the last few years school
nutritionists have been working hard to improve the content and quality
of the slop—I mean, food—they serve, hoping to make the youth of our
country happier and healthier while at the same time taking their job
title out of the running as Oxymoron of the Year. But while they focus
on the food, they’re ignoring the other important part of
lunch—using soda straws to shoot butter wads at the dorks who study
hard and blow the grading curve. They’re also ignoring what kids
drink.

It used to be that the only
choices were milk, chocolate milk, and choking down that Swiss steak,
French fries, and Italian bread dry while hoping no one from the
European Union would taste any of it and start an international
incident. Then they began serving juice with lunch. Unfortunately in
order to be called juice all a drink needs is to spell the word
correctly on the label and include more sugar than water. Not long
after, soda machines were installed. This wasn’t done because someone
convinced schools that Coke and Pepsi lost their EPA classification as
paint removers and were actually health foods, but rather because the
soda companies started paying them.

Parents are
beginning to worry about whether their children are drinking too much
juice and soda. At least they are in Belgium, where a group is trying to
help students cut back on their intake of sweetened drinks by getting
them to switch to beer.

See, the school lunch program, like any other waste recycling
operation, needs to be funded. It’s not cheap buying good quality
ingredients. It’s not even cheap to buy the stuff the airlines have
rejected, which is what schools use. Some of the money to pay for this
comes from the students, at least the ones who haven’t had to turn
their lunch money over to the class bully under threat of having their
knapsack filled with their about to be detached body parts. Some money
comes from the federal and local governments. The rest has to come from
somewhere.

Enter Coke and Pepsi, which
offer big bucks for the exclusive right to be sold on school grounds.
They don’t do this because they want to brag about being the Official
Soft Drink of the Sunnydale Snail Darters. No, they do it because they
know that the sooner kids develop a brand allegiance, the better. It’s
the same concept the tobacco companies use except Coke and Pepsi are
allowed to use a cartoon camel for a mascot if they want.

Now parents are beginning to
worry about whether their children are drinking too much juice and soda.
At least they are in Belgium, where a group is trying to help students
cut back on their intake of sweetened drinks by getting them to switch
to beer. This is true. The altruistic public safety group is De
Limburgse Biervrienden, or Limburg Beer Friends, and they’ve been
holding taste testings to see if 8-year-old schoolchildren like having
beer with lunch or whether they’d prefer a shot of schnapps. Just
kidding. About the schnapps anyway.

It’s good for children to learn to drink moderately and
responsibly at an early age. It demystifies it, teaching them that
drinking won’t help them date the Swedish Bikini Team.

Now before you get your Budweiser baseball cap in a knot, the
beer they’re serving the kids only contains between 1 and 2.5 percent
alcohol. While this is more than water, it’s less than the 12 percent
typical Belgian beer can contain. It’s so tame they give the stuff to
new mothers in the hospital, Americans visiting the country who
wouldn’t know real beer if they drank it, and soon, kindergarteners at
lunch time.

The campaign started after a
professor announced that children who drink sugary soda and juices run a
higher risk of getting breast cancer than those who don’t. While
drinking water, unsweetened iced tea, and diet sodas would cut the risk,
the researcher recommended beer. He also suggested they eat more
waffles, chocolate, and diamonds to help boost the economy. Low-alcohol
versions, of course.

This trend isn’t confined to
Belgium. Children are drinking beer in Japan too. Mangus is a
low-alcohol beer which is marketed to athletes, expectant mothers, and
lightweights. The Tokyo-based manufacturer, German Beverage Consulting,
Ltd, is working hard to figure out where their name came from. They’re
also trying to cultivate a new generation of beer drinkers, which is why
they sell it to schoolchildren. At least they don’t claim to have
lofty goals like saving children from breast cancer.

Experts say it’s good for
children to learn to drink moderately and responsibly at an early age.
It demystifies it, teaching them that drinking won’t help them date
the Swedish Bikini Team, that wining is okay while whining isn’t, and
that binge drinking can be Absolut Hell. But the real plus is that, in
spite of the low-alcohol content of the beer the kids may be swilling
with lunch, anything’s a good thing if it will help dull the senses
and taste buds during a school lunch. After all, gray may be a food
group but that doesn’t mean it’s a tasty one.